“There are two
blessings of which people never know the value until they have lost them, (said
Byron,) health and reputation. And not only is
their loss destructive to our own happiness, but injurious to the peace and comfort of
our friends. Health seldom goes without temper accompanying it; and, that fled, we
become a burden on the patience of those around us, until dislike replaces pity and
forbearance. Loss of reputation entails still greater evils. In losing caste,
deservedly or otherwise, (continued Byron,) we become reckless and
misanthropic: we cannot sympathize with those, from whom we are separated by the
barrier of public opinion, and pride becomes the scorpion, girt by fire, that turns on
our own breasts the sting prepared for our enemies. Shakspeare says, that it is a bitter thing to look into happiness
through another man’s eyes; and this must he do, (said
Byron) who has lost his reputation. Nay, rendered nervously
sensitive by the falseness of his position, he sees, or fancies he sees, scorn or
avoidance in the eyes of all he encounters; and, as it is well known that we are never
so jealous of the respect of others as when we have forfeited our own, every mark of
coldness or disrespect he meets with arouses a host of angry feelings that prey upon
his peace. Such a man is to be feared (continued Byron); and yet
how many such have the world made! how many errors have not slander and calumny
magnified into crimes of the darkest die! and, malevolence and injustice having set the
condemned seal on the reputation of him who has been judged without a trial, he is
driven without the pale of society, a sense of injustice rankling in his heart; and if
his hand be not against each man, the hand, or at least the tongue, of each man is
against him. The genius and powers of such a man (continued Byron)
act but as fresh incitements to the unsated malice of his calumniators; and the fame
they win is but as the flame that consumes the funeral pile, whose blaze attracts
attention to the substance that feeds it. Mediocrity is to be desired for those who
lose caste, because if it gains not pardon for errors, it sinks them into oblivion. But
genius (continued Byron) reminds the enemies of its possessor of
his existence, and of their injustice. They are enraged that he, on whom they heaped
obloquy can surmount it, and elevate himself on new ground, where their malice cannot
obstruct his path.”

It was impossible not to see that his own position had led Byron to these reflections; and on observing the changes in
his expressive countenance while uttering them, who could resist pitying the morbid
feelings which had given them birth? The milk and honey that flowed in his breast has been
turned into gall by the bitterness with which his errors have been assailed; but even now,
so much of human kindness remains in his nature, that I am persuaded the effusions of
wounded pride which embody themselves in the biting satires that escape from him are more
productive of pain to him who writes, than to those on whom they are written. Knowing
Byron as I do, I could forgive the most cutting satire his pen
ever traced, because I know the bitter feelings and violent reaction which led to it; and
that, in thus avenging some

* Concluded from No. CLI. p. 315

CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON

415

real or imagined injury on individuals, he looks on them as a part
of that great whole, of which that world which he has waged war with, and that he fancies
has waged war with him, is composed. He looks on himself like a soldier in action, who,
without any individual resentment, strikes at all within his reach, as component parts of
the force to which he is opposed. If this be indefensible, and all must admit that it is
so, let us be merciful even while we are condemning; and let us remember what must have
been the heart-aches and corroding thoughts of a mind so sensitive as
Byron’s, ere the last weapons of despair were resorted to,
and the fearful sally, the forlorn, hope attack, on the world’s opinions, made while
many of those opinions had partisans within his own breast, even while he stood in the last
breach of defeated hope, to oppose them. The poison in which he has dipped the arrows aimed
at the world has long been preying on his own life, and has been produced by the
deleterious draughts administered by that world, and which he has quaffed to the dregs,
until it has turned the once healthful current of his existence into deadly venom,
poisoning all the fine and generous qualities that adorned his nature. He feels what he
might have been, and what he is, and detests the world that has marred his destiny. But, as
the passions lose their empire, he will think differently: the veil which now obscures his
reason will pass away, like clouds dispelled by the sun; he will learn to distinguish much
of good, where he has hitherto seen only evil; and no longer braving the world, and, to
enrage it, assuming faults he has not, he will let the good qualities he has, make
themselves known, and gain that good will and regard they were formed to conciliate.

“I often, in imagination, pass over a long lapse of years, (said
Byron,) and console myself for present
privations, in anticipating the time when my daughter will know me by reading my works;
for, though the hand of prejudice may conceal my portrait from her eyes, it cannot
hereafter conceal my thoughts and feelings, which will talk to her when he to whom they belonged has ceased to exist. The triumph will
then be mine; and the tears that my child will drop over expressions wrung from me by
mental agony,—the certainty that she will enter into the sentiments which
dictated the various allusions to her and myself in my works,—consoles me in many
a gloomy hour. Ada’s mother has feasted on
the smiles of her infancy and growth, but the tears of her maturity shall be
mine.”

I thought it a good opportunity to represent to Byron, that this thought alone should operate to prevent his ever writing a
page that could bring the blush of offended modesty to the cheek of his daughter; and that,
if he hoped to live in her heart, unsullied by aught that could abate her admiration, he
ought never more to write a line of Don Juan.
He remained silent for some minutes, and then said, “You are right; I never
recollected this. I am jealously tenacious of the undivided sympathy of my daughter;
and that work, (Don Juan,) written to beguile hours of tristesse and wretchedness, is well calculated to loosen my hold
on her affection. I will write no more of it;—would that I had never written a
line!“

There is something tender and beautiful in the deep love with which poor
Byron turns to his daughter. This is his last resting-place, and on her heart has he cast his
last anchor of hope. When one reflects that he looks not to consolation from her during his
life, as he believes her mother implacable, and only hopes that, when the grave has closed

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over him, his child will cherish his memory, and weep over his
misfortunes, it is impossible not to sympathize with his feelings. Poor
Byron! why is he not always true to himself? Who can, like him,
excite sympathy, even when one knows him to be erring? But he shames one out of one’s
natural and better feelings by his mockery of self. Alas!

“His is a lofty spirit, turn’d aside

From its bright path by woes, and wrongs, and pride;

And onward in its new, tumultuous course,

Borne with too rapid and intense a force

To pause one moment in the dread career,

And ask—if such could be its native sphere?”

How unsatisfactory is it to find one’s feelings with regard to
Byron varying every day! This is because he is never
two days the same. The day after he has awakened the deepest interest, his manner of
scoffing at himself and others destroys it, and one feels as if one had been duped into a
sympathy, only to be laughed at.

“I have been accused (said Byron) of thinking ill of women. This has proceeded from my sarcastic
observations on them in conversation, much more than from what I have written. The fact
is, I always say whatever comes into my head, and very often say things to provoke
people to whom I am talking. If I meet a romantic person, with what I call a too
exalted opinion of women, I have a peculiar satisfaction in speaking lightly of them;
not out of pique to your sex, but to mortify their champion; as I always conclude, that
when a man overpraises women, he does it to convey the impression of how much they must
have favored him, to have won such gratitude towards them; whereas there is such an
abnegation of vanity in a poor devil’s decrying women—it is such a proof
positive that they never distinguished him that I can overlook it. People take for
gospel all I say, and go away continually with false impressions. Mais n’importe! it will render the statements of
my future biographers more amusing; as I flatter myself I shall have more than one.
Indeed, the more the merrier, say I. One will represent me as a sort of sublime
misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling. This, par
example, is my favorite rôle.
Another will portray me as a modern Don Juan; and a
third (as it would be hard if a votary of the Muses had less than the number of the
Graces for his biographers) will, it is to be hoped, if only for opposition sake,
represent me as an amiable, ill-used gentleman, ‘more
sinned against than sinning.’ Now, if I know myself, I should say, that I
have no character at all. By the by, this is what has long been said, as I lost mine,
as an Irishman would say, before I had it. That is to say, my reputation was gone
according to the good-natured English, before I had arrived at years of discretion,
which is the period one is supposed to have found one. But, joking apart, what I think
of myself is, that I am so changeable, being every thing by turns and nothing
long,—I am such a strange mélange of good and evil,
that it would be difficult to describe me. There are but two sentiments to which I am
constant,—a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant, and neither is
calculated to gain me friends. I am of a wayward, uncertain disposition, more disposed
to display the defects than the redeeming points in my nature: this, at least proves
that I understand mankind, for they are always ready to believe the evil, but not the
good; and there is no crime of

CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON

417

which I could accuse myself, for
which they would not give me implicit credit. What do you think of me?”
(asked he, looking seriously in my face.)

I replied, “I look on you as a spoilt child of genius, an
epicycle in your own circle.” At which he laughed, though half disposed to be
angry.

“I have made as many sacrifices to liberty (continued Byron) as most people of my age; and the one I am about to
undertake is not the least, though, probably, it will be the last; for, with my broken
health, and the chances of war, Greece will most likely terminate my mortal career. I
like Italy, its climate, its customs, and above all its freedom from cant of every
kind, which is the primum mobile of England;
therefore it is no slight sacrifice of comfort to give up the tranquil life I lead
here, and break through the ties I have formed, to engage in a cause, for the
successful result of which I have no very sanguine hopes. You will think me more
superstitious than ever (said Byron) when I tell you, that I have
a presentiment that I shall die in Greece; I hope it may be in action, for that would
be a good finish to a very triste existence,
and I have a horror to death-bed scenes; but as I have not been famous for my luck in
life, most probably I shall not have more in the manner of my death, and that I may
draw my last sigh, not on the field of glory, but on the bed of disease. I very nearly
died when I was in Greece in my youth; perhaps as things have turned out, it would have
been well if I had; I should have lost nothing, and the world very little, and I would
have escaped many cares, for God knows I have had enough of one kind or another; but I
am getting gloomy, and looking either back or forward is not calculated to enliven me.
One of the reasons why I quiz my friends in conversation is, that it keeps me from
thinking of myself. You laugh, but it is true.”

Byron had so unquenchable a thirst for celebrity, that
no means were left untried that might attain it: this frequently led to his expressing
opinions totally at variance with his actions and real sentiments, and vice versâ, and made him appear quite inconsistent and puerile. There was no
sort of celebrity that he did not, at some period or other, condescend to seek, and he was
not over nice in the means, provided he obtained the end. This weakness it was that led him
to accord his society to many persons whom he thought unworthy the distinction, fancying
that he might find a greater facility in astonishing them, which he had a childish
propensity to do, than with those who were more on an equality with him. When I say persons
that he thought unworthy of his society, I refer only to their stations in life, and not to
their merits, as the first was the criterion by which Byron was most
prone to judge them, never being able to conquer the overweening prejudices in favour of
aristocracy that subjugated him. He expected a deferential submission to his opinions from
those whom he thought he honoured by admitting to his society; and if they did not seem
duly impressed with a sense of his condescension, as well as astonished at the versatility
of his powers and accomplishments, he showed his dissatisfaction by assuming an air of
superiority, and by opposing their opinions in a dictatorial tone, as if from his fiat
there was no appeal. If, on the contrary, they appeared willing to admit his superiority in
all respects, he was kind, playful, and good-humoured, and only showed his own sense of it
by familiar jokes, and attempts at hoaxing, to which he was greatly addicted.

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An extraordinary peculiarity in Byron
was his constant habit of disclaiming friendships, a habit that must have been rather
humiliating to those who prided themselves on being considered his friends. He invariably,
in conversing about the persons supposed to stand in that relation to him, drew a line of
demarcation, and Lord Clare, with Mr. Hobhouse and Moore, were the only persons he allowed to be within its pale. Long
acquaintance, habitual correspondence, and reciprocity of kind actions, which are the
general bonds of friendship, were not admitted by Byron to be
sufficient claims to the title of friend; and he seized with avidity every opportunity of
denying this relation with persons for whom, I am persuaded, he felt the sentiment, and to
whom he would not have hesitated to have given all proof but the name, yet who, wanting this, could not consistently with delicacy receive aught
else.

This habit of disclaiming friendships was very injudicious in Byron, as it must have wounded the amour propre of those who liked him, and humiliated the
pride and delicacy of all whom he had ever laid under obligations, as well as freed from a
sense of what was due to friendship, those who restrained by the acknowledgment of that
tie, might have proved themselves his zealous defenders and advocates. It was his
aristocratic pride that prompted this ungracious conduct, and I remember telling him, apropos to his denying friendships, that all the persons with whom
he disclaimed them, must have less vanity, and more kindness of nature, than fall to the
lot of most people, if they did not renounce the sentiment, which he disdained to
acknowledge, and give him proofs that it no longer operated on them. His own morbid
sensitiveness did not incline him to be more merciful to that of others; it seemed, on the
contrary, to render him less so, as if every feeling was concentrated in self alone, and
yet this egoist was capable of acts of generosity, kindness, and pity for the unfortunate;
but he appeared to think, that the physical ills of others were those alone which he was
called on to sympathize with; their moral ailments he entered not into, as he considered
his own to be too elevated to admit of any reciprocity with those of others. The
immeasurable difference between his genius and that of all others he encountered had given
him a false estimate of their feelings and characters; they could not, like him, embody
their feelings in language that found an echo in every breast, and hence he concluded they
have neither the depth nor refinement of his. He forgot that this very power of sending
forth his thoughts disburthened him of much of their bitterness, while others wanting it
felt but the more poignantly what is unshared and unexpressed. I have told
Byron that he added ingratitude to his other faults, by scoffing
at, and despising his countrymen, who have shared all his griefs, and enjoyed all his
biting pleasantries. He has sounded the diapason of his own feelings, and found the concord
in theirs, which proves a sympathy he cannot deny, and ought not to mock. He says, that he
values not their applauses or sympathy; that he who describes passions and crimes touches
chords, which vibrate in every breast: not that either pity or interest is felt for him who
submits to this moral anatomy; but that each discovers the symptoms of his own malady and
feels and thinks only of self, while analyzing the griefs or pleasures of another.

When Byron had been one day repeating
to me some epigrams and lampoons, in which many of his friends were treated with great
severity, I observed that, in case he died, and that these proofs of
friendship

CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON

419

came before the public, what would be the feelings of those so
severely dealt by, and who previously had indulged the agreeable illusion of being high in
his good graces!

“That (said Byron) is
precisely one of the ideas which most amuses me. I often fancy the rage and humiliation
of my quondam friends at hearing the truth (at least from me) for the first time, and
when I am beyond the reach of their malice. Each individual will enjoy the sarcasms
against his friends, but that will not console him for those against himself. Knowing
the affectionate dispositions of my soi-disant friends, and the mortal chagrin my death would
occasion them, I have written my thoughts of each, purely as a consolation for them in
case they survive me. Surely this is philanthropic, for a more effectual means of
destroying all regret for the dead could hardly be found than discovering, after their
decease, memorials in which the surviving friends were treated with more sincerity than
flattery. What grief (continued Byron, laughing while he spoke)
could resist the charges of ugliness, dulness, or any of the thousand nameless defects,
personal or mental, to which flesh is heir, coming from one ostentatiously loved, lamented, and departed, and when reprisals or
recantations are impossible! Tears would soon be dried, lamentations and eulogiums
changed to reproaches, and many faults would be discovered in the dear departed that
had previously escaped detection. If half the observations (said
Byron) which friends make on each other were written down instead of being said, how few would remain on terms of
friendship! People are in such daily habits of commenting on the defects of friends,
that they are unconscious of the unkindness of it, which only comes home to their
business and bosoms when they discover that they have been so
treated, which proves that self is the only medium for feeling or judging of, or for,
others. Now I write down, as well as speak, my sentiments of
those who believe that they have gulled me; and I only wish (in case I die before them)
that I could return to witness the effect my posthumous opinions of them are likely to
produce on their minds. What good fun this would be! Is it not disinterested in me to
lay up this source of consolation for my friends, whose grief for my loss might
otherwise be too acute? You don’t seem to value it as you ought (continued Byron,
with one of his sardonic smiles, seeing that I looked, as I really felt, surprized to
his avowed insincerity). I feel the same pleasure in anticipating the rage and
mortification of my soi-disant friends, at the discovery of my
real sentiments of them, that a miser may be supposed to feel while making a will which
is to disappoint all the expectants who have been toading him for years. Then only
think how amusing it will be, to compare my posthumous with my previously given
opinions, one throwing ridicule on the other. This will be delicious (said he, rubbing
his hands,) and the very anticipation of it charms me. Now this, by your grave face,
you are disposed to call very wicked, nay, more, very mean; but wicked or mean, or both
united, it is human nature, or at least my nature.”

Should various poems of Byron that I
have seen ever meet the public eye, and this is by no means unlikely, they will furnish a
better criterion for judging his real sentiments than all the notices of him that have yet
appeared.

Each day that brought Byron nearer to
the period fixed on for his departure for Greece seemed to render him still more reluctant
to undertake it. He frequently expressed a wish to return to England, if

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only for a few weeks, before he embarked, and yet had not firmness
of purpose sufficient to carry his wishes into effect. There was a helplessness about
Byron, a sort of abandonment of himself to his destiny, as he
called it, that commonplace people can as little pity as understand. His purposes in
visiting England, previous to Greece, were vague and undefined, even to himself; but from
various observations that he let fall, I imagined that he hoped to establish something like
an amicable understanding, or correspondence, with Lady
Byron, and to see his child, which last desire had become a fixed one in his
mind. He so often turned with a yearning heart to his wish of going to England before
Greece, that we asked him why, being a free agent, he did not go. The question seemed to
embarrass him. He stammered, blushed, and said,—

“Why, true, there is no reason why I should not go; but yet I
want resolution to encounter all the disagreeable circumstances which might, and most
probably would, greet my arrival in England. The host of foes that now slumber, because
they believe me out of their reach, and that their stings cannot touch me, would soon
awake with renewed energies to assail and blacken me. The press, that powerful engine
of a licentious age, (an engine known only in civilized England as an invader of the
privacy of domestic life,) would pour forth all its venom against me, ridiculing my
person, misinterpreting my motives, and misrepresenting my actions. I can mock at all
these attacks when the sea divides me from them, but on the spot, and reading the
effect of each libel in the alarmed faces of my selfishly-sensitive friends, whose
common attentions, under such circumstances, seem to demand gratitude for the personal
risk of abuse incurred by a contact with the attacked delinquent,—no, this I
could not stand, because I once endured it, and never have forgotten what I felt" under
the infliction. I wish to see Lady Byron and my
child, because I firmly believe I shall never return from Greece, and that I anxiously
desire to forgive, and be forgiven, by the former, and to embrace Ada. It is more than probable (continued
Byron) that the same amiable consistency,—to call it by
no harsher name,—which has hitherto influenced Lady
B.’s adherence to the line she has adopted, of refusing all
explanation, or attempt at reconciliation, would still operate on her conduct. My
letters would be returned unopened, my daughter would be prevented from seeing me, and
any step I might, from affection, be forced to take to assert my right of seeing her
once more before I left England, would be misrepresented as an act of the most
barbarous tyranny and persecution towards the mother and child; and I should be driven
again from the British shore, more vilified, and with even greater ignominy, than on
the separation. Such is my idea of the justice of public opinion in England (continued
Byron) and, with such woeful experience as I have had, can you
wonder that I dare not encounter the annoyances I have detailed? But if I live, and
return from Greece with something better and higher than the reputation or glory of a
poet, opinions may change, as the successful are always judged favourably of in our
country; my laurels may cover my faults better than the bays have done, and give a
totally different reading to my thoughts, words, and deeds.”

With such various forms of pleasing as rarely fall to the lot of man,
Byron possessed the counter-balance to an
extraordinary degree, as he could disenchant his admirers almost as quickly as he had won
their

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421

admiration. He was too observant not to discover, at a
glance, the falling off in the admiration of those around him, and resented as an injury
the decrease in their esteem, which a little consideration for their feelings, and some
restraint in the expression of his own, would have prevented. Sensitive, jealous, and
exigent himself, he had no sympathy or forbearance for those weaknesses in others. He
claimed admiration not only for his genius, but for his defects, as a sort of right that
appertained solely to him. He was conscious of his foiblesse, but wanted either the power or inclination to
correct it, and was deeply offended if others appeared to have made the discovery.

There was a sort of mental reservation in Byron’s intercourse with those with whom he was on habits of intimacy
that he had not tact enough to conceal, and which was more offensive when the natural
flippancy of his manner was taken into consideration. His incontinence of speech on
subjects of a personal nature, and with regard to the defects of friends, rendered this
display of reserve on other points still more offensive; as, after having disclosed secrets
which left him, and some of those whom he professed to like, at the mercy of the discretion
of the person confided in, he would absolve him from the best motive for secresy—that
of implied confidence—by disclaiming any sentiment of friendship for those so
trusted. It was as though he said, I think aloud, and you hear my thoughts; but I have no
feeling of friendship towards you, though you might imagine I have from the confidence I
repose. Do not deceive yourself: few, if any, are worthy of my friendship; and only one or
two possess even a portion of it. I think not of you but as the first recipient for the
disclosures that I have le besoin to make, and as
an admirer whom I can make administer to my vanity, by exciting in turn surprise, wonder,
and admiration, but I can have no sympathy with you.

Byron, in all his intercourse with acquaintances, proved
that he wanted the simplicity and good faith of uncivilized life, without having acquired
the tact and fine perception that throws a veil over the artificial coldness and
selfishness of refined civilization, which must be concealed to be rendered endurable. To
keep alive sympathy, there must be a reciprocity of feelings; and this
Byron did not, or would not, understand. It was the want of this,
or rather the studied display of the want, that deprived him of the affection that would
otherwise have been unreservedly accorded to him, and which he had so many qualities
calculated to call forth. Those who have known Byron only in the
turmoil and feverish excitation of a London life, may not have had time or opportunity to
be struck with this defalcation in his nature; or, if they observed it, might naturally
attribute it to the artificial state of society in London, which more or less affects all
its members; but when he was seen in the isolation of a foreign land, with few
acquaintances, and fewer friends, to make demands either on his time or his sympathy, this
extreme egotism became strikingly visible, and repelled the affection that must otherwise
have replaced the admiration to which he never failed to give birth.

Byron had thought long and profoundly on man and his
vices,—natural and acquired;—he generalized and condemned en
masse, in theory; while, in practice, he was ready to allow the exceptions to his
general rule. He had commenced his travels ere yet age or experience had rendered him
capable of forming a just estimate of the civilized world he had left, or the uncivilized
one he was exploring: hence

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he saw both through a false medium, and
observed not that their advantages and disadvantages were counterbalanced.
Byron wished for that Utopian state of perfection which experience
teaches us it is impossible to attain,—the simplicity and good faith of savage life,
with the refinement and intelligence of civilization. Naturally of a melancholy
temperament, his travels in Greece were eminently calculated to give a still more sombre
tint to his mind, and tracing at each step the marks of degradation which had followed a
state of civilization still more luxurious than that he had left; and surrounded with the
fragments of arts that we can but imperfectly copy, and ruins whose original beauty we can
never hope to emulate, he grew into a contempt of the actual state of things, and lived but
in dreams of the past, or aspirations of the future. This state of mind, as unnatural as it
is uncommon in a young man, destroyed the bonds of sympathy between him and those of his
own age, without creating any with those of a more advanced. With the young he could not
sympathize, because they felt not like him; and with the old, because that, though their
reasonings and reflections arrived at the same conclusions, they had not journeyed by the
same road. They had travelled by the beaten one of experience, but he had abridged the
road, having been hurried over it by the passions which were still unexhausted and ready to
go in search of new discoveries. The wisdom thus prematurely acquired by
Byron being the forced fruit of circumstances and travail acting
on an excitable mind, instead of being the natural production ripened by time, was, like
all precocious advantages, of comparatively little utility; it influenced his words more
than his deeds, and wanted that patience and forbearance towards the transgressions of
others that is best acquired by having suffered from and repented our own.

It would be a curious speculation to reflect how far the mind of
Byron might have been differently operated on had
he, instead of going to Greece in his early youth, spent the same period beneath the genial
climate, and surrounded by the luxuries of Italy. We should then, most probably, have had a
“Don Juan” of a less reprehensible
character, and more excusable from the youth of its author, followed in natural succession,
by atoning works produced by the autumnal sun of maturity, and the mellowing touches of
experience,—instead of his turning from the more elevated tone of “Childe Harold” to “Don Juan.” Each year, had life been spared him,
would have corrected the false wisdom that had been the bane of Byron,
and which, like the fruit so eloquently described by himself as growing on the banks of the
Dead Sea, that was lovely to the eye, but turned to ashes when tasted, was productive only
of disappointment to him, because he mistook it for the real fruit its appearance
resembled, and found only bitterness in its taste.

There was that in Byron which would
have yet nobly redeemed the errors of his youth, and the misuse of his genius, had length
of years been granted him; and, while lamenting his premature death, our regret is rendered
the more poignant by the reflection, that we are deprived of works which, tempered by an
understanding arrived at its meridian, would have had all the genius, without the
immorality of his more youthful productions, which, notwithstanding their defects, have
formed an epoch in the literature of his country.

John Fitzgibbon, second earl of Clare (1792-1851)
A Harrow friend of Byron's, son of the Lord Chamberlain of Ireland; he once fought a duel
with Henry Grattan's son in response to an aspersion on his father. Lord Clare was Governor
of Bombay between 1830 and 1834.

John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869)
Founder of the Cambridge Whig Club; traveled with Byron in the orient, radical MP for
Westminster (1820); Byron's executor; after a long career in politics published Some Account of a Long Life (1865) later augmented as Recollections of a Long Life, 6 vols (1909-1911).

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Irish poet and biographer, author of the Irish Melodies (1807-34),
The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Lalla
Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.